Month: June 2013

“In his lifelong solitude, the Naskapi hunter has to rely on his own inner voices and unconscious revelations; he has no religious teachers to tell him what he should believe, no rituals, festivals or customs to help him along. In his basic view of life, the soul of man is simply an “inner companion” who he calls “my friend”, or Mista'peo, meaning “Great Man”. Mista'peo dwells in the heart and is immortal……(CG Jung, MHS, p.161)

Mista'peo, the inner “great man”, seemingly corresponds to the neshama, the highest level of individual soul in Jewish thought. Rebbe Nachman zt”l says : “Neshama is an aspect of sechel (intelligence), which is an aspect of hochmah (wisdom), which gives life to all things, as it is said, 'You made all things with wisdom (Tehillim/Psalms 104).'Alll these are an aspect of Torah.”

The inner neshama, which is sechel, is spiritually inseperable from the wisdom which underlies and is the basis for all- the wisdom with which God created the world. Rebbe Nachman says elsewhere, “All things recieve their life from Torah. Avraham Avinu was able to recieve from this Torah before Israel recieved the Torah at Sinai, because of the high level of his soul (LM 2,78).” The Torah that all things recieve their life from is of course no other than Hashem's wisdom, with which he sported before creation (Mishlei/Proverbs 8).

All of this indicates that there is a inner wisdom accesible to all of us, and that this inner wisdom, as in the case of the Mistapeo, exists aside from revelation.

Some argue that this is not so, that without Biblical revelation we are lost- without wisdom or morality. But this cannot be the case. Yoram Hazony points out that the Tanakh in fact presents God as expecting righteous behaviour and wisdom from humans before the Torah was given. If human beings do not have an innate sense of these things than how could God's expectations be just? other examples abound. When the Torah itself is given to Israel God says that it will be “your wisdom before the nations”. If the Nations, being bereft of Torah, have no moral wisdom then how could they be expected to recognize the wisdom of the Torah's laws? (Hazony, The Philosophy of Hebrew Scripture).

Does this mean then that all we have to do is heed our inner voice? Far from it. First off, the ability to listen well to the voice fo the neshama depends on personal purity and the wisdom of experience. Both take time to aquire and are not always available. In the age of cultural confusion and barbarism it has become even harder to hear the “small, still voice.” We need to study the Torah and the words of our sages and connect with purer waters than those often available in our own cisterns and those of the public.

To indulge in a little iconoclasm and quote the Catechism of the Catholic Church: ” …'God, the first principle and last end of all things, can be known with certainty from the created world by the natural light of human reason.' Without this capacity, man would not be able to welcome God's revelation. Man has this capacity because 'He is created in the image of God.'….'yet there are many obstacles….the human mind is hampered in the attaining of such truths, not only by the impact of the senses and the imagination, but also bydisordered appetites…'..This is why man stands in need of being enlightened by God's revelation.” (CCC 36-38).

That does not mean, however, that we cannot rely at all on our own intelligence and sense of morality. That would represent the opposite extreme. Wisdom and conscience (yirat Hashem) are inherent, God-given potentials which need to be attended to and nurtured, not abandoned or repressed.

We stand in need of the middle way. To follow our intuition and intelligence alone is folly and waste- what a sea of human and revealed wisdom is available to us! Likewise to surrender our own wisdom and conscience is mistaken, as we will not grow through this misguided self-abnegation but rather become blunter and blunter instruments until we may very well find ourselves more vulnerable to delusion and “disordered appetites” then we were before. After all, as they say, even the Devil quotes scripture.